Poems of W.B. Yeats: The Tower Questions and Answers

The poem traces the speaker’s movement from youth to age, and the corresponding geographical move from Ireland, a country just being born as Yeats wrote, to Byzantium. Yeats felt that he no longer belonged in Ireland, as the young or the young in...

The speaker only has a few lines to convey that core emotions like lust and rage need not be pejorative. The speaker still wants passion in his life. He wants to feel flashes of youth that still lay within his spirit.